Empty House Begone!

This is the last day of peaceful quietness.  Or foreboding silence and emptiness.  Depending on how I’m viewing the world at any particular given moment.  It generally takes a few days of everyone being gone before the silence really starts to get to me and I finally cave in and turn on the TV (which then stays on until some boys come home and turn it off) for background noise.  This time, they’ve been gone entirely too long and I’m really looking forward to my full house again.  I do not know what I will do with myself if I happen to survive long enough to see them all to adulthood and find myself living alone on a regular basis.  I suppose I will travel.  A lot.

Today we’re leaving late because my daughter wants to tag along and she happens to be in northern Ohio at a basketball camp for the weekend.  Good news, they’re losing badly and as such she’ll be home early enough that it’s still reasonable to leave tonight rather than tomorrow.  Not that I was going to wait anyway.  I’ve never claimed to be reasonable when it comes to things like road trips.  I was chatting with BFF and remembering a time when my middler was a baby and I was traveling quite frequently between IL and OH.  It was a seven hour trip, door to door, and could *maybe* be done in 6.5 on a good night under the right circumstances.  However, middler was a horrible, horrible, awful road tripper as a little guy, and these trips would quite frequently fall into the 10-hour or more marathon sessions that were hell for me and the older two (who were in the ranges of 4-6 for the younger and 7-9 for the older).  Middler could escape from every car seat known to man once he started toddling, so from about 12 months on I’d be driving up the interstate at 70+ mph and BOP here’d be little middler between the seats grinning just as big as you please.  I’d stop and get him resituated and restrapped and check everything to make sure I had it all done up correctly and try my best to look all mad and mean mommy when I told him in no uncertain terms that he had to stay in his seat… and ten or so minutes later BOP there’d be his little head again.  I recall one night pulling over somewhere in KY and just crying on the side of the road, because I was out of solutions and I’d been stopping every 10 minutes for 300 miles and I was just so tired and so frustrated and he just would. not. stay. and I could not find straps that could contain him.  And he wasn’t old enough to understand, and not going was not an option (I was doing court-ordered visitation schedules and it really was not optional).  Oh, if he was behaving enough to actually stay in his seat (sometimes if the other kids would stay awake, they could make this happen for me) then he had terrible motion sickness and would inevitably puke all over everything at about the halfway point.  It was hell.  I do not know how I survived these years.

I never did find a good solution, but one strategy that I frequently employed was leaving at dusk such that the kids would fall asleep within an hour or so into the trip, and I’d arrive at the other end at 2 or 3 a.m. tired and bedraggled but at least without the drama of Middler Houdini and his Incredible Puking Extravaganza.  I really enjoyed the late night drives, and being alone, and loved the feeling of it being just the trucks and me.  I recall on occasion that the only thing I *really* hated was having to stop and pee, because 1) I felt vulnerable as a woman traveling alone with 3 small children at 1 a.m. at a truck stop in Nowhere, Indiana and 2). I hated that I had to wake 3 sleeping children just so I could run in and pee.  But I was not about to leave them unattended and sleeping in the car so what choice did I have?  It was still a better solution than driving with Houdini Pukekid, and I just tried to minimize the stops. I could do the trip with one stop on a good night, but more often it took two.

Tonight, I’ll be reminded of those trips as my daughter and I head out to Chicago kind of lateish.  Not *that* late, but it will be 2 a.m. Ohio time when we arrive, most likely.  These days, however, I’m more likely to be in bed by 10:00 p.m., and pulling an all-nighter means that I’m going to need to catch up with an all-dayer (of sleep!)  Then again, I still have frequent bouts of insomnia in which I proudly proclaim on my facebook wall that “Sleep is for wimps” and declare that I do not need it anyway.  Hopefully some of that attitude will hit me tonight, as I anticipate it will be a GREAT night for insomnia!

Speaking with my mom about this (the late traveling and such) and she insists that we all did things when we were younger that we wouldn’t dare repeat today – that common sense and the wisdom of aging instills upon us a desire to tread carefully as we realize just how fragile life really is.  I disagree, however, at least for myself.  I did in fact do all sorts of silly, inane, foolhardy, dangerous, and spontaneous things that I consider to be in the realm of “Mommy Adventures” (as my kids like to call them) but I think that I would repeat most of them today if I had the chance.  And the lungs.  YOLO and all that.  Life *is* fragile, but I tend to view that as more of a reason to live for today and enjoy and treasure the moment I’m in.  I try not to think about tomorrow too much, and maybe that means I’m in denial a bit but I’m okay with that.  I’ll let other people worry about what tomorrow will bring, I’m too busy having fun today.

With that, I’m off to Chicago and hopefully it will be a non-adventure.  My night vision is not as sharp as it once was. 🙂

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Minnesota and the long way home

Hmmm, where was I?  Somewhere in an I state?  Well, things have been only slightly insane here.  I had a road trip to MN to be with a good friend through a rough patch, and even though the circumstances were less than ideal, it was a great trip.  I’m really happy I was able to be there, and I got to see some lovely scenery that I’d never seen before.  That said, it was a 14 hour drive or so, and it really took the wind out of my sails.  I feel like I’ve been recovering for a week or so now, but in reality I held up fairly well.  I just happened to catch a cold from one of the kids this weekend, and have been fighting it off rather unsuccessfully.  I broke down and called an ambulance for a trip to the ER early Monday morning, and had my IV solumedrol and Rocephin, and now I’m good as new.  Or at least as good as I get.

So, things that amuse me about Wisconsin.  I had the pleasure of driving through this lovely state twice, once on the way there and again on the way home.  I chose a very different route on the way home through the back roads on the northern side of the state since I had time to kill and a friend to meet in Oshkosh, and oh wow I had no idea that Wisconsin was so very rural.  I got to see the “World’s Largest Talking Cow”

COW!

Just up the road a bit was an old one room schoolhouse.  A lovely sign outside told me all about the composting toilets that are now functional where the outhouses used to be, and all the information I ever needed about taking my school on a field trip and educational endeavor, should I desire to take my students to this lovely historical landmark.

A historical monument

Here is the view from the road I was on, in case you didn’t know just how rural Wisconsin is:

Rural Roads

See?  Country, nothing but country.  Other amusing things… The emphasis placed on cheese.  Who knew there were so many variations on the “cheese” theme?  I found fudge cheese.  I’ve never heard of such a thing, and actually I haven’t been brave enough to open it and try it  yet.  I need a partner in crime for this, I think.

The accent, oh wow.  I can’t say that I’d ever heard that accent before.  I stopped for gas and cheese somewhere along the way and the cashier sounded like someone straight out of “Fargo.”  I thought they made that up for dramatic effect; should have realized that it had some basis in reality.

Oh, and the forests?  Are completely and totally different.  Not only were their trees all still naked (while ours here were green and filling out) but there was also a marked absence of deciduous forest.  So much of the landscape was coniferous, and it was just kind of interesting to note.  I’d not been that far north on *this* side of Lake Erie, and I guess it surprised me that the forests resembled Maine more than Ohio.  Don’t know why, just never thought about it.

And finally, they have highways with letter names.  So you go up I-94 and then take Highway F over to Highway R… some had double letter names, but the ones I noticed were double of the same letter – AA or BB or FF, but not NO or OB or FU.  Ohio does not have letter names for highways.

This trip really stirred up my interest in a cross country drive, and I hope it’s something that I get to do before I get too sick.  Seems like such a daunting journey, but I’m optimistic and hopeful that I’ll make it sometime soon.  Not likely this summer, but maybe next year.  For now I’m going to set my sights on visiting bff in Rochester a little later in May.  Once this cold passes, I will hopefully be good to go again, and I look forward to it.  Just need to wrap up a few things here and find someone to take two little guys to the two baseball games they’ll miss while I’m road tripping.  Baseball is all my 8yo is living for at the moment; he can’t talk about anything else.  When is my next game?  Next practice?  Can I go outside and play catch with myself?  With my brother?  Is it time for my game yet?  Did you wash my uniform?  On and on and on.  In fact, I don’t think that I’ve seen him this excited about anything else, ever, but baseball has always been this way for him.  And he’s good at it, so that gives him a confidence boost that is really good for him.

At any rate, I’m just trying to catch up with the trippin and the bloggin and the sleepin and such, but that wraps up MN and WI.  Next blog stop – more I states?  Who knows!

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